VENICE BEACH, California — Los Angeles’s ever-expanding homeless problem is now likely landing on the doorstep of celebrity-filled beachfront neighborhoods as the beleaguered City Council looks for ways to alleviate some of the stress on world-famous Venice Beach.
The 2-mile strip of Venice, where actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and many others have pumped iron on an outdoor makeshift seaside gym, has now been claimed by thousands of homeless living in a tent city. Venice is only 3 square miles, and an estimated 4,000 homeless live there, said Soledad Ursua, a member of the Venice Neighborhood Council’s Board of Directors.
Warm Weather CaliforniaThe number is double from the previous year and nearly rivals the 4,600 living in Skid Row.
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The situation is a lawless wasteland filled with filth, rats, fires, and crime, where police are defunded and residents fend for themselves from the encroaching madness, Ursua said. Senior residents are afraid to walk outside as violent robberies have risen by 177% and assaults with a deadly weapon 116% over the last year, according to Los Angeles Police Department statistics.
“We are homeowners within a homeless encampment, it’s all around us,” Ursua said. “You can get shot or stabbed. No one in their right mind would take their children there at night or in the day.”
The community group Fightbackvenice.org counted 1,901 homeless in 2020. A new count was not taken this year because of the pandemic, but the current population is at least double, said Ursua, who owns a house near the beach.
Residents from the newly proposed locations have been up in arms over their likely forthcoming neighbors.
“All I hear is, ‘We don’t want to become Venice,’” Ursua said of her wealthy fellow Californians in the target zone. “Well, now you know what we have been going through because it’s coming your way.”
Vaulted enclaves such as Playa del Rey, Marina del Rey, Culver City, and Pacific Palisades have been identified as homeless shelters in the form of tiny homes, “safe camping,” and/or “RV safe parking,” according to a motion submitted by Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin, who has the coastal district.
Covid-19 Does What Nothing Else Could: Get LAs Homeless InsideWhen the Beach Boys sang about Pacific Palisades being one of their favorite spots in the hit song “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” it’s safe to say the band never envisioned an infinite row of homeless tents up on the formerly pristine California coast, where $2.6 million is the average home price.
Celebrities who have lived in “the Palisades” or currently do include actors Ben Affleck, Billy Crystal, and Dan Aykroyd; boxer Sugar Ray Leonard; and directors Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams.
“They don’t have the homeless there, we have 90% of the beach’s homeless in Venice,” Ursua said. “Basically, all of Venice is homeless.”
Summer is coming, and it’s unclear what Los Angeles will do to keep tourists safe who visit the coast. A handful of proposed homeless shelters won’t even put a dent in the existing problem that was made worse by Bonin’s proposal to cut staffing for LAPD officers who patrol the beach due to the “defund the police” movement.
A 1968 anti-camping ordinance had kept homelessness in check until Los Angeles stopped enforcing it in the past decade. A 2018 court decision negated enforcement unless enough shelters existed to house individuals. Neighboring Orange County, which has a fraction of the homeless, enforces an anti-camping law.
Los Angeles is a defendant in a federal lawsuit that accuses the city of refusing to house individuals living on Skid Row. U.S. District Court Judge David Carter, who cleaned up Orange County with a similar type of lawsuit, issued a withering opinion blasting Los Angeles city officials as corrupt.
Carter accused the city of violating the U.S. Constitution clauses of equal protection and due process in addition to creating a “state danger” that violated California law requiring “protection, care and assistance to the people of the state … by providing appropriate aid and services to all of its needy and distressed.”
At last count, Los Angeles had 66,436 homeless, a 20,000 increase over the past five years. California has one-fifth of the nation’s homeless population with 151,278 people, according to 2021 statistics by the World Population Review.
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Ursua says she hopes the judge can take a look at Venice because the problem isn’t going to be solved by City Hall.
“The beaches used to be safe for children and families,” she said. “If I wanted to live at the beach overlooking the ocean, I have to pay $2 million. Why should someone get that for free?”
